That’s what Mark Twain said. One reader took exception to the crime stats we pulled out in the first article of our series (you can now read the article here). Here’s his letter, followed by our response:
After reading the article in the most recent Charlotte Magazine about the crime “problem” in Charlotte, one would think the solution to this “problem” is throwing resources (read: people) at the problem by infusing the criminal justice system with cash. However, most sociological studies around crime and the justice systems have shown that the justice system itself rarely plays a role in the prevention of crime on a large-scale. The only thing that has been consistently tied to crime is poverty, and addressing the poverty situation is much more likely to result in positive outcomes that can be sustained as the city continues to grow. Putting more cops on the street is not a deterrent to violent crime, just as the death penalty is not a deterrent for murder. For more details on the death penalty and its lack of deterring murder, see Thorsten Sellin’s research from 1959, Zimring & Hawkins’ research in 1986 and Bailey & Peterson’s work from 1997. All replications of these studies have found that capital punishment plays no part in the decision to take another person’s life.
Furthermore, the magazine’s lame attempt at using comparative data is misleading to readers. Cherry-picking two cities — Austin and San Jose — that fit with a pre-conceived theme for the article is not exactly responsible research. Attached is data directly from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (all of the data is 2005 data), and you can see that Charlotte is very near the middle of U.S. cities with population between 550,000 and 911,000 (where San Jose is). The median size and average size of these peers are very close to Charlotte’s population. Using a data set of this size and scope would at least be a little more responsible.
Jacob Crawford
Charlotte, NC
I can’t figure out how to get Mr. Crawford’s Excel sheet into this blog post, but here are the bottom line numbers: As he said, the population range for cities he included was 550,000 to 911,000. Charlotte was at 677,00, or much closer to the smallest than the largest. Here are the median crime numbers for those cities in 2005, with Charlotte’s figures in parantheses: violent crime 6010 (7933), homicide 91 (85), rape 268 (323), robbery 2440 (3649), burglary 7146 (12,783), vehicle theft 6,631 (7098), murder rate 12.8 (12.6).
So Charlotte is at the bottom end of the population range, but over the median number in all stats except murder, and well over the median in all but vehicle theft. Don’t we deserve a safer city than that? —R.T.
